Bold efforts to push academic publishing towards an open-access model are gaining steam. Negotiators from libraries and university consortia across Europe are sharing tactics on how to broker new kinds of contracts that could see more articles appear outside paywalls. And inspired by the results of a stand-off in Germany, they increasingly declare that if they don’t like what publishers offer, they will refuse to pay for journal access at all. On 16 May, a Swedish consortium became the latest to say that it wouldn’t renew its contract, with publishing giant Elsevier.
A lot of this research in partially or fully tax-funded, and as such, published articles must be freely available to the public. Good development.
I’m surprised the article doesn’t mention pressure from the other side too. In the UK, any publications submitted to the REF (the assessment UK researchers benchmark themselves by) must be Open Access: https://www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk/policies/ref2021
Similarly all published Horizon 2020 research must be Open Access: https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/docs/h2020-funding-guide/…
H2020 has gone even further though, encouraging not just Open Access publications, but also Open Access to research data, which can be just as important. The next step has to be mandatory Open Access to the computer programs used in the research too, so they can be properly replicated. Publishers have no control over whether data or software is published, so it’s shameful it doesn’t happen more widely already.
A good step towards openness of knowledge. Nice.
The unfortunate reality is that virtually all the Open Access journals are utter shit. Unscrupulous academics use them to boost their publishing rate for funding and promotion.
Last week I looked at the work of a university Professor. She had published about 5 articles in legitimate journals in 20 years. Then she started publishing in Open Access journals. Nearly 100 absolute crap papers were published in 10 years. She got a promotion to full Professor and her own lab.
This. +1 a hundred times over. I regularly review for a number of mid-to-high level journals in my field. I’ve been asked a few times to review for some open access journals – after checking them out (papers, ed. boards, etc.) I never took any of them on, most of them are a joke, publishing a very large number of paid papers that couldn’t make the cut anywhere else. There are some exceptions, but not many [yet]. Not saying there aren’t crap papers at other – more “classic” – journals, gee, I know pretty well there are a ton, but at this point they are still a better filter for higher quality publications than most open access outlets.
Edited 2018-05-21 07:30 UTC
It certainly used to be the case that open access meant ‘pay money to skip peer review’, but that really isn’t the case any more. For example in computer science Springer LNCS, IEEE and even Elsevier (the publisher in the article) have good open access journals. Just to pick one example, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (impact factor 17) is hybrid open access.
I would say that the main problem is the utter stupidity about relating the number of published papers, and the references to them, as a way to quantify academics excellence and to reward the researchers.
It created a system begging to be tampered*. It also created a push to publish that resulted on an exponential growth on the number of published papers.
The obvious and foretelling consequence: to find anything good is really hard when we are submerging in a sea of worthless articles. This is utter annoying.
* what I see as a way to play the system:
– divide what would be a good, whole, article on many parts (this is really very common);
– put references on a paper that really should no be there (also very common);
– “reciprocate the kindness” when reviewing research from known pals and approve them to be published;
– “reciprocate the kindness” when submitting papers and put references to pals articles;
– publish things that belong, at most, to universities internal publications, on some more general journal.
While you have a valid point, the quality of Open Access publications highly depends on the field of research.
There are research communities where Open Access is already the norm. For examples, look into physics, biochemistry, physiology. Look at PLoS (high-impact open-access publisher in biology and related fields) or arXiv (almost-complete mirror of most-relevant physics/math papers). Nature Communications is open-access, while other Nature publications can be published open-access at will.
They show that it can work out the right way. It just depends on how the research community is structured and the prevailing mindset.
Edited 2018-05-21 13:49 UTC
Disclaimer, I also work in research, most of it funded by EU or national public money. However, almost none of the funding sources we’ve ever come in contact with has supported (i.e., included funding for) Open Access publication fees, which can be anywhere from a few hundred euros to well above a thousand. Per article. My workplace has some internal funding for this purpose, but very limited (i.e., not enough for everyone). We make most of our papers available – depending on specific (c) allowances – however, as ever, the issue is not black and white.
You can demand free acess, but someone has to pay the bill. Shifting it from subscription fees to publication fees doesn’t magically solve all problems. Unless there’s an unlimited cash well from which all publication fees can be paid, there can’t be a reasonable demand for total free access.
Yes, research funding could include publication fees, but it’s not that simple. Project proposals have to contain a fixed final budget, there’s no way to plan for an unknown number of publication fees. Sometimes there’s 1 article in 3 years, sometimes there’s 10, you can’t know beforehand, so you can’t calculate for them, even if funding for publication fees might be available – which they not always are.
Anyway, I’m kind of tired to endlessly talk about this issue. My – and not only my – stance on this matter is, if someone pays the bill, we’ll publish open access. Otherwise we’ll follow whatever the journals’ (c) agreements require.
I understand your exhaustion with this issue. Worrying about open access and publishing bureaucracy is the last thing most researchers want to spend their time thinking about.
However, I must admit my experience has been different from yours. For example, with H2020 funding you’re entitled — even expected — to factor article processing charges into your budget. It’s the same as with conferences. You don’t really know how many you’re going to attend in advance, or how much travel will cost, but it’s not hard to make a decent ballpark guess when putting together the budget.
As someone who has an academic degree himselfe, and had to use scientific papers I have a fundamental problem with the system:
Papers are written by academics and reviewed by academics.
Publication of papers is free in the digital age.
So in essence the job of the publisher boils down to hooking up the reviewer with the writer.
Why is there even a market for these publishers here?
Are universities realy incapable to keep a tally on how many papers the had reviewed and how many they did review?